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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Sony Fined £250K for 2011 Hack, Weak Security Core Complaint

In 2011, Sony’s PlayStation Network was hacked and compromised 77 million accounts exposing customer names, addresses, dates of birth, passwords as well as payment details.

The breach wasn’t quickly identified and it took longer for Sony to inform customers of the breach because it wasn’t until it noticed that payment details were compromised that the company informed its customers.

Sony offered financial compensation to those who suffered monetary loss due to the breach while others just waited for the outage to be over and get back to gaming.

A year later, it was discovered that aside from customers’ information being hacked, about 50,000 music files were also compromised. Most of the music files said to have been from the late King of Pop Michael Jackson.

The hack happened almost two years ago, it seems everyone has moved on, forgotten what happened, thinking that Sony already learned its lesson and fortified its security, but not everyone has locked the incident in the past.

“The wheels of civil justice turn slowly,” says Kyt Dotson, HackANGLE editor. “The case of Sony getting hacked was a hot item at the time–especially for those 77 million users–and it’s lead to a lot of questions about industry standards for keeping users safe. We continue to see mega-sized breaches year-in and year-out and regulation centering on increased cybersecurity may be as necessary as customers learning to better protect themselves.”

Fined for weak security

The Information Commissioner’s Office fined Sony £250,000 for the hack stating that it was in “serious breach of the Data Protection Act.”

“If you are responsible for so many payment card details and log-in details then keeping that personal data secure has to be your priority. In this case that just didn’t happen,” said David Smith, deputy commissioner and director of data protection. “When the database was targeted – albeit in a determined criminal attack – the security measures in place were simply not good enough.”

As for the penalty imposed on Sony, Smith stated that it was just, considering the fact that the company put people’s identities at risk for theft.

“The penalty we’ve issued today is clearly substantial, but we make no apologies for that. The case is one of the most serious ever reported to us. It directly affected a huge number of consumers, and at the very least put them at risk of identity theft,” added Smith.

Although Smith pointed out that because of the breach, 77 percent of consumers are now more cautious about giving out their personal details on websites.

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.